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Monday, February 2, 2009

Of late I have had a lot of customers call me up to recover their precious data from their laptop or desktop PC after a serious crash or virus attack. A simple but rarely used method which can be adopted by all operating systems whether it be Xp or Vista. The only requirement is that your hard drive has to be partitioned or you need to have a second hard drive available.

So in order to save you a great deal of heartache in the future I will now go through with you how to move your ‘My Documents’ folder from its default location at the time when windows was installed to another partition or better still another hard drive which will greatly reduce any risk of data loss.First go to the intended new location of your ‘My Documents’ folder, create a new folder and rename it, yep you guessed it ‘My Documents’.

Now we will tell the computer to relocate the contents of your original ‘My Documents’ folder to the new folder you have just created on another hard drive or partition.To do that go to Start and open up the Start menu in the bottom left corner of your desktop, ‘Right Click’ on ’My Documents’ in the start menu. Left Click on ‘Properties’ on the pop- up menu.

In Vista click on the ‘Location’ tab in the newly opened ‘Documents Properties’ box.

Then click the ‘Move’ button and then navigate to and select your new ‘My Documents’ folder. Your computer will now move you ‘My Documents’ files from the folder in C:\ drive to your newly created folder on another partition or hard drive.Now I hear you ask? What is the purpose of changing the location of your original ‘My Documents’ folder off C:\ drive?

Well to answer that question, when people have problems with their computer whether it be their operating system ‘Windows’ is sick, they have caught a virus which has gone rampant or if your hard drive is playing up to the point where Windows won’t boot up, the first thing you will be asking yourself is ‘Are my personal files ok!’ In most cases they will still be there but they just won’t be readily accessible. In other cases a serious ‘recovery mission’ might be what the doctor orders; which can be expensive and time consuming and provides no guarantee of recovering all if any files especially if a virus is involved or the hard drive has lost its file structure is or damaged in any way.

So it goes without saying ‘An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure’!

For just a little configuration change you can save yourself the possibility of a Huge Headache while giving yourself peace of mind that your personal data is secure!

If for any reason you don’t feel comfortable making the above windows configuration change or you would like a new hard drive and backup image created as well as your ‘My Documents’ folder relocated by an expert technician and you live within the Adelaide suburbia, please feel free to give me a call.